The late Arden Bender and his wife, Carol, made 105 fiddles before he died in January 2007. And during his life, he never sold a single fiddle that he made. “He was a very private person,” 
Mrs. Bender, a native of Wayne, W. Va., told Dave Peyton of The Charleston Daily Mail. "He didn’t really want anyone to know he made them. "
Nontheless, these are remarkable instruments. “I’ve played every fiddle in the collection and there’s not a bad one in the lot,” says Joe Dobbs of Fret 'n Fiddle in St. Albans, WV. “Some folks think all you have to do (to make a violin) is take one apart and match the parts with new parts, and then put new fiddles together. That doesn’t work,” Dobbs said. “Arden didn’t do that. He knew the technical aspects of fiddle making."
Arden Bender worked nearly every day for long hours on his creations, only stopping to eat, Mrs. Bender said. He bought 
thousands of dollars worth of tools for his fiddle shop. But as he turned the fiddles out, signing and numbering each one, he never gave a thought to selling any of them.
Bender bought only top quality materials for making the instruments. Most of the wood came from Bosnia, Mrs. Bender said. Dobbs said that the strings are top of the line. No shortcuts were used in making the instruments.
Cathy Grant, an accomplished violinist and fiddle instructor, agrees. A native of Ohio who moved to West Virginia, she started her career as a professional musician with the Cleveland Symphony and she’s played a lot of stringed instruments. While she hasn’t played all of the Bender fiddles, the ones she has played are resonant and top of the line, she said. Looking at the wall lined with all those handcrafted fiddles, she gasped “I feel like Martha Stewart.”
