Barrel Polishing

Product:
We manufacture High Carbon Steel pins (1% carbon).
The pins are up to 1mm thick and up to 50mm long and one side of this pin is ground to a point finish. These are like nails without a head and are used in the textile and Jute industry.
Question:
After heat treatment, we wish to polish these pins in a rotating barrel. Presently we use caustic soda ⇦liquid caustic soda in bulk on Amazon [affil link] for 12 hours to clean and polish the surface.
We would like to know of any chemical that we can add/substitute with the Soda ash - in order to
1. speed up the cleaning/polishing process to less than 4 hours
2. Improve the polish brightness of the pins.
We would appreciate your expert advise.
Thank you.

Its messy to use NaOH; why not think of Silicon Carbide instead?

The question in my mind is, what do you consider a polished finish. Are you talking about a surface finish or something that looks good. There are abrasive or burnishing products that can be added to your parts in a batch type operation; however, you will then need to separate the parts from the media. If your parts are ferrous this is an easy process, if they are not, then if becomes a little more difficult. Naturally, some kind of compound is desirable to enhance and speed up the processing, but again, that product depends upon your media and lubricity is key to improve the finished parts.