Working now, but with question
OK I followed audioguru's advice and tried using the 74HC4060 again with good results this time.
I had tried it several years ago with higher frequency crystals in other applications and gotten good results, just not with the crystals below 1 Mhz (I think I had left out the high resistance resistor in series with one leg of the crystal). The circuit that I am experimenting with today is with the 32.768 khz crystal.
I got this working correctly but got no output on pin 3 (the f/16386 output). I took pin 12 (reset) to ground with a 22K resistor and got 2 Hz output on pin 3, tested by soldering a LED from this pin to ground and comparing this to the clicks of radio station WWV.
However, when I fed that into the 74HC74 flip flop hooked up as a divide-by-two, I was still getting a 2 Hz output, and the LED would barely flicker a few times in between the main flashes. I removed the 74HC74 and substituted a 74LS74 and now I get a 1 Hz flash with no flickers, just steady on/off flashes every second.
Does anyone have any theories about what might have the HC part might have behaved like that? Was the HC part just too fast? It was a new part, but I guess that new parts can be bad out of the package. The 32 khz signal looked clean on my scope.
Chris