Does anyone know of a sdimple and accurate way to create gauge faces - ie circles, arcs and tick marks?

Depends on the tools you have available... PS, PSP, 3DS...?

a good 'paint program' is certainly the 1st step.even then you can spend a lot of time dividing up a circle into the desired gradiants. you might also look for existing gauges that are arranged in the proper increments then redraw the numbers words..etc to suit your needs.another aproach is to look for gauges/panels on the internet and clean them up. a decent panel photo can help you in getting shadow effects and appearance closer to the 'real thing'.very exaclty drafted gauges faces often appear cartoonish when placed on a panel.paint shop pro and adobe are great for drawing and colors ( work in 2 million colors then drop the finished gauge down to 256 for the panel.both psp and adobe are weak at drafting (ticks)i would guess that most folks use a combination of tools.

I use Max8 to model the gauge in 3d, texture, build tick marks using the Array tool, and then render the scene and save as an image.I then load the image into Photoshop for final sizing and assembly of the gauge elements.I ran across a freeware program a few years ago that will draw tick marks based on user input parameters, and then save the result as a .bmp file, but quite frankly wasn't too impressed with the final output.As already suggested, finding and using good, hi-res photos of your desired gauge (or similar) will frequently give good results.