fuel gauge and left side of tach won't light up with rest of interior lights

i just bought the car and found out that some of the bulbs were burnt out in the dash so i went about replacing them, everything is working now except my fuel and tach backlighting. i took the bulb out (farthest to the left illumination bulb) and replaced it, even bent the bulb contacts in the socket so as to make for a good connection with the bulb, and even bent the ears for the socket down so they can get a good contact on the back of the cluster. i even tried switching sockets with another in the system so i know the socket isn't bad but I'm running out of ideas, the only thing i haven't tried is to just have the cluster rebuilt but i don't think that its worth 40 buck just to fix a light. especially since everything else in the cluster works perfectly.