I have sometimes scanned my blades at the edge of a printer/scanner instead of tracing them, for better accuracy. But I have to be careful not to scratch the glass.
I do find it very interesting that the left and right skates in the pair were an almost perfect match, despite the inconsistency often claimed of MK/Wilson factory sharpenings. Could they somehow sharpened together at the factory?
Which shape do you like better for skating - Ace (you mean Coronation Ace, right?) or MK Pro? Why?
I'm a bit surprised at how gradually the rocker radius changes. I feel that a more abrupt change between the spin rocker and main rocker makes it easier to feel where the change is, which gives me a felt reference point for where I am on the blade. But maybe better skaters don't need or want that.
How much of your blade measurement techniques is just for fun, to see if you can do it, and how much do you actually use them to reshape your blade to improve your skating? Do you make your engineering students cook up new measurement systems too? Maybe a good engineering project for your (advanced) students would be to design and build skate measurement tools or even skate sharpeners?
BTW, Skate Science's web site suggested (I haven't looked at it recently) that the shapes were designed to match muscular power curves of elite athletes - e.g., that they take into account how much strength they have, at what points in the roll along the blade, and that they created rocker profiles to match, in order to vault higher into the air on jumps, if I understood correctly, though they weren't that specific. (They didn't explain, when I looked, what their ice dance blades were supposed to optimize.) I haven't seen you skate, but is it is conceivable your strength and power curves don't match the specific elite skaters they designed their blades for?
When I called them, they tried to convince me that their blades, would nonetheless be optimal for not-so-athletic me, despite the advertised match to the strength and power curves of elite athletes. That left me wondering if there might be more hype than substance to their claims, especially in my case. But maybe that is unfair.
The basic idea - that the blade shape should match the athlete's strength and power curves, for optimal results - makes a certain sense, if the athlete is willing to put sufficient time into learning to use the new blades. I'm just not sure that the curves are the same for everyone.
With your engineering skills, perhaps you could figure out a way to measure your strength and power curves, and derive the optimal blade shape for you, for the kinds of skating you do, and reshape your new blades to match? That could be a really cool product you could offer, or make your students design - perhaps you (or they) could also design C&C control software to cut blades to match individual customers' strength curves...
(It's a shame no one has figured out an easy way to rapidly reshape a blade, a la the liquid metal Terminator, so we could rapidly experiment with different blade shapes... Maybe custom sharpening is the closest we can come for now.)