My partner and I are looking at getting into cycling. Our plan is to commute to work which is a 15km round trip but then do some occasional rides for fun on the weekend. Our area is quite flat but with a few steep hills in the Barossa Valley. We are lucky to have well kept rail trails connecting the towns so that is what we will use mostly.

I really love steel frames and have found the Bombtrack Audax which looks like a neat bike. In South Australia there seems to be very little available in terms of relaxed steel bikes like this.

We took them for a test ride last week but felt that we were too stretched out. I'm 176cm with an inseam of 79cm and my partner is 159cm with an inseam of 73cm. I rode on the M 53cm and my partner rode the S 51cm. The bike seems to have quite a long top tube coupled with long stems of 120mm and 100mm respectively. I'm unsure if we need to go a size down each or if we can just change the stem lengths by a good 20-40mm. Is it a bad thing to swap stems to adjust the fit like this?

Would a bike like this suit what we want to do and does anyone have experience with Bombtrack?