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People often ask if I had to drink a lot of beer to build an Earthship. The answer is no but it sure helps. The second main building component in an Earthship is the aluminum cans. The cans are used to build the internal, non-structural walls. The picture on the left shows the entrance to the airlock. This is the one location in the house where the can wall is a structural wall.
The picture on the right is a close up of the can wall. You can see how it is layered with cans and then concrete and then another layer of cans. You can also see how the tabs of the cans all point to the outside. This is done whenever possible due to the tab acting as a lathe for the adobe plaster to hold onto.
In this picture of our office, you can see the beginning
of the plastering. The plastering of the can walls starts off with a
layer of concrete and then finishes with adobe or stucco depending on
the location of your wall. Unlike the external can walls, the cans can't
all point in the same direction because you need to plaster on each
end of the cans.
In this last picture of the can walls we discovered a
great way to get a lot of work done and that was have a work party to
have friends help with the plastering. In the process we got a lot of
our can walls plastered. In this picture Eric and Elizabeth learned
to plaster before they built their own Earthship the following summer.
The process was a learning one for all of us.