My best guess is that the blade is sharp, but at 600 grit, there’s going to be a lot of “tooth.” When I started out on my WE I treated every blade as “finished” at 600. When I moved up to 1000-grit it was a woo-hooo! moment. Sharpened all my knives to 1000-grit and stropped them to 3.5 micron diamond paste on leather. Then, one day I tried to cut a piece of 1″ hemp rope that was under tension. Might as well have had a plastic knife, as the knife edge just slid across the rope fibers with zero fibers cut.
The answer is to polish the bevel faces to reduce friction, but leave some “tooth” on the edge, to bite into the individual fibers.
My guess is that the tooth of your edge is biting into the cutting board, and the rough surface of the bevels are resisting. If you have some way to strop the edge, do so. Polishing the bevels will improve things greatly. The Japanese I’ve seen on the internet suggest stapling a section of denim onto a board and load it with whatever compound you can find.
3 users thanked author for this post.