Electronic – Edge detector – transistor only

I'd guess 2 possibilities. The first (and one you should be dealing with anyways) is that you don't have a decoupling capacitor on your flip-flop. You need a 0.1 uF ceramic between V+ and ground, as close to the chip as you can get. Putting it on the breakout board is best, assuming you can without damaging the chip.

The second possibility has to do with your connection to the signal generator. How long is the wire, and how fast are the transitions? If you're not properly terminated and the leads are long, the flip-flop may be responding to ringing on the clock line.

Your connection does not require worrying about timing from input to output. A delay will not make a difference.

Neither of your chips are differential, so I really can't advise you on this issue.

You are handling set and reset lines exactly right.

And while it's a little late, you might consider a different flip-flop. Since you're working with protoboards and are clearly new to the subject, I'd suggest that you get a few 74HC74s in DIP packages. These will simply plug into your protoboard without the need for adapters. For learning how logic chips work, this is a whole lot easier on the eyes and pocketbook that trying to start with little surface mount devices.

You may implement this digital design for detecting rising edge.

^{simulate this circuit – Schematic created using CircuitLab}

The output will go high as soon as a rising edge is detected on the D input. The output is cleared on the next rising clock edge.