im considering either stripping down and cleaning my zenith or replacing it all together with a webber any suggestion would be great, i would like better fuel consuption and general overall running thanks

Lots of threads and articles available about refurbing Zeniths - including fixes for warped carb bodies. I put a new Zenith on mine years ago and it runs just fine. General consensus seems to be the Webber gives a couple of mpg improvement, the Zenith give a bit more power and smoother pickup from low revs.

I bought some Defender 90 manifolds and fitted a twin-choke weber, involved some fabrication to make a cable throttle and bodging the exhaust but the thing now flys _and_ uses less petrol. I got the fanimolds off ebay and bought a new (£200+) carb and rejetted it (another £20 or so). But it's paid for itself already in the past few months as I'm now getting 20-24mpg instead of 15 or so and it picks up more nicely. I was lucky in that I had a Wideband Lambda sensor to help set it up...

The old weber was ok but had started to leak around the throttle bushings and so kept going out of tune...I beleive there is a rebuild kit to sort that out if you're buying a 2nd hand one.

The other popular 34ICH is easier to fit but if you buy one from ebay make sure its got the right jets fitted as they were used in a lot of smaller cars like VW's and sometimes come jetted for those smaller engines...