I am in the process of designing and building a low cost machine that would allow me to make notches in tubing faster than by hand operation. Tubing would be loaded into a fixture where a spindle mounted hole saw would then be fed through the tubing and back to it's original position. What I would like to accomplish is the ability to set up multiple notching stations that I could load tubes into and press "go" while I move on down the line. The spindle and motor will be mounted on a sliding table with ball screw for movement. Is this a reasonable application for singe axis CNC?

I personally would love for there to be a simple switch that sent the table forward, and then reverse. Maybe this would be the best option? It would be really nice to add the flexibility of controlling feed rate so I could fine tune the fastest reasonable speed to make it through the tube. Or to also easily make it slower if a particular thin tube was catching on the saw teeth.

A single servo motor and Mach 3 seems reasonable, but would I be able to start and stop each axis (a separate servo motor on different machine) with that software?

I appreciate any and all thoughts. Thanks.